The Bauhaus was not the only institution considered to be a place of reflection on design theories and new practices in the twentieth century; the China Academy of Arts (CAA), one of the China’s oldest art school, represented another design school that was connected with the Bauhaus. bauhaus imaginista presents the exhibition Moving Away at the opening of the China Design Museum.

bauhaus imaginista presented the exhibition Moving Away at the opening of the China Design Museum. A range of objects, prototypes, archival material, as well as plans and studies of urban projects will be shown alongside original works from the academy’s collection of Chinese modern design. In China, bauhaus imaginista focuses on how universal design principles were developed, adapted, expanded or renewed by designers and architects in different social and political contexts. The exhibition will shed light on the ways in which Bauhaus principles have been discussed, translated and adapted over the course of the twentieth century to the present day including in the former USSR, India, North Korea and China.

The way in which a Bauhaus’s design ethos spread internationally, its institutional role and its evolution from within diverse cultures, forms the basis of the bauhaus imaginista exhibition Moving Away. The titleindicates both the migration of Bauhaus ideas, as well as the distance produced by time and geography.

Marcel Breuer’s filmstrip ein bauhaus-film. fünf jahre lang (a bauhaus film. five years long, 1926) visualizes the development of chair design from crafted object to industrial prototype towards a future where designed objects become obsolete. Breuer wrote about the need for design to evolve in response to changing needs, something to consider when reflecting on the international reception of Bauhaus ideas. The collage appeared in the Bauhaus magazine, no. 1 (1926) as an advertisement, reflecting the attempt to sell and promote Bauhaus products designed by students and teachers in a more creative and ironic way.

While Breuer’s collage addresses the chair – the magazine’s contents introduce the reader to the basic principle of Bauhaus design, which was to go beyond the individual object in order to think about the building as a whole. This meant the development of new designs for cups, chairs, textiles, wall colours and flooring, through to campus architecture, single houses and housing estates. In its later period this extended from environmental and urban studies to city planning on a grand scale. Bauhaus ideas, including the potential for modern design to transform the human environment, has spread throughout the world to, for example, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, Mexico, Chile, Iran and North-Korea. Never as pure dissemination, but always accepted and rejected in relation to local conditions.

Two decades after the Bauhaus closed its doors the HfG Ulm (founded in 1953) continued but also contested Bauhaus ideas. It regularly hired Bauhaus masters and students to teach a version of the preliminary course, based on a visual and tactile training in colour and form, considered a basic qualification for new students. When HfG Ulm developed links with the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad (founded in 1961) and the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) in Mumbai (founded in 1969), aspects of the preliminary course were incorporated into the Indian curriculum, along with workshop based teaching. From the perspective of post war Germany and post-Independence India, design was understood by these schools as a catalyst for economic reconstruction, and in India it was also seen as a development tool that could utilise centuries old Indian crafts traditions, as well as artisan and vernacular skills, through field work and projects undertaken by students.

Bauhaus ideas entered China through architects such as Richard Paulick, who was Walter Gropius’ assistant and Wang Dahong (a student of Gropius). Both were hired to teach at the Architecture Department of St. John's University established in 1942, which had a curriculum that directly referenced the Bauhaus model. After 1945, these two architects played an important role in the development of a Greater Shanghai Plan, a modern urban project based on rationalist principles. In the same period, the renowned Chinese architect Liang Sicheng began a new approach to teaching architecture at the Tsinghua University (Beijing) which was strongly influenced by Gropius. Subsequently, during the cultural revolution Bauhaus ideas were attacked as bourgeois, but in recent decades have they been rehabilitated in China.

The way in which a Bauhaus’s design ethos spread internationally, its institutional role and its evolution from within diverse cultures, forms the basis of the bauhaus imaginista exhibition Moving Away. The titleindicates both the migration of Bauhaus ideas, as well as the distance produced by time and geography. The exhibition will be presented as part of the opening of the China Design Museum (located on the China Academy of Arts campus Hangzhou). It will feature a range of objects and prototypes for commercial production as well as plans and studies of architectural and urban projects, which will be shown alongside original works from the academy’s collection of Western modernist design. To accompany the exhibition, an international symposium (April 9–10, 2018) will address a rich history of Bauhaus’s relationship with design and architecture in Asia.

As early as 1929, Kazuzo Saito, a Japanese teacher who had visited Bauhaus, came to Hangzhou National College of Art (the former China Academy of Art) to teach basic courses about modern design. Since the 1930s, Zhang Guangyu and other pioneers of modern design begun to actively introduce the Bauhaus and its concept into the curriculum, which laid the foundation for the development of modern design in China. → more

The industrial design and visual communication projects executed by faculty members of the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Mumbai, and the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, reveal their strong emphasis on securing a good “standard of living” through design for the Indian masses, and projecting the image of a modernizing forward-looking nation. → more

In 2012, China Academy of Art (Hangzhou) set up the Bauhaus Institute in the context of establishing Bauhaus and European modern design collections. The Bauhaus Institute aims to explore the value of the Bauhaus heritage in the development of contemporary design through academic research, education & the popularization of design. → more

As a correspondent for the bauhaus imaginista project, I was invited to share my impressions and thoughts of the exhibition in Hangzhou. The following text and gif collage is a personal encounter with Moving Away and an attempt to capture the affective dimension of the exhibition. → more

The passenger ship Patris II transported the participants of the 4th International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) from Marseilles to Athens and back. Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy, travelling as a “friend of the new building movement” produced this half-hour soundless film as a travel journal. → more

The NID was involved in a joint venture with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in the adoption for development of a group of villages in Rajasthan. Could local self-reliance emerge from a process of mutual learning between communities and other groups of people? The film shows how leather work and weaving emerged as the opportunity and basis for sustained group effort. → more

“The Indian state has only existed for 13 years. And world history would be unthinkable without its unorthodox influence. India has delivered more new content in the last decade than any other country." HfG Ulm founder Otl Aicher's report on his trip to India in 1960 and the slides he took during his journey across the country are impressive observations of a country in upheaval. From today’s perspective, this material reads like an overture to the future collaboration between two design schools: the HfG Ulm and the NID in Ahmedabad. → more

The building theory classes at the Bauhaus focused on imparting a functional understanding of architecture. Building had become a science. As a result, the ADGB Trade Union School was designed logically from the inside out. Walter Peterhans’ photographs of the school images illustrate both the architect’s intentions for the building and the environmental studies conducted by Bauhaus students. → more

The article focusses on Richard Paulick’s sixteen-year exile in Shanghai. It is an examination of the interaction between a Bauhaus socialist and a Far East port city in its rush to modernize at the midpoint of the twentieth century. → more

One of the many Hungarians associated with the Bauhaus, painter and graphic designer Sándor Bortnyik (1893-1976) opened his art and design school, Műhely, in Budapest in 1928 to bring the Bauhaus’s sprit and some of its teaching methods into Hungary. Even if Bortnyik’s school did not have the scope of the Bauhaus, it was an efficient experiment in an independent form of institutionalized education in the field of modern graphic design and typography. → more

As a correspondent for the bauhaus imaginista project, I was invited to share my impressions and thoughts of the exhibition in Hangzhou. The following text and gif collage is a personal encounter with Moving Away and an attempt to capture the affective dimension of the exhibition. → more

As early as the end of the 19th century up to the beginning of the 20th century, which is to say before the founding of the Bauhaus and after China’s forced opening through war to the outside world, China had already been witness to various experiments in modernization. Such experiments contributed to the laying down of a foundational mindset necessary for the acceptance of the Bauhaus in China’s traditional culture. → more

This essay explores the connection between Walter Gropius and I. M. Pei, as well as the influence of the one on the other. After completing his studies, I. M. Pei worked with Gropius on plans for a university in Shanghai, which he subsequently realized in Taiwan, than in association with Chang Chao-Kang and Chen Chi-Kuan. → more

The passenger ship Patris II transported the participants of the 4th International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) from Marseilles to Athens and back. Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy, travelling as a “friend of the new building movement” produced this half-hour soundless film as a travel journal. → more

The NID was involved in a joint venture with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in the adoption for development of a group of villages in Rajasthan. Could local self-reliance emerge from a process of mutual learning between communities and other groups of people? The film shows how leather work and weaving emerged as the opportunity and basis for sustained group effort. → more